Platform9 in the News

Startups are the lifeblood of the tech world — young companies led by visionary entrepreneurs who are willing to bet their futures and their fortunes on emerging technologies.

While many organizations today are considering a move to the cloud, startup Platform9 is offering an innovative approach to enable organizations to use their on-premises infrastructure as a private cloud deployment. Platform9 first emerged from stealth mode in August of 2014 and has been steadily growing ever since.

Depending on the source, private clouds are either going the way of the dodo or they’re growing faster than a bullet train. The reality is that true private clouds, as opposed to merely virtualized data centers, are becoming more popular.

Most of the early-stage technology companies recently participating in the MIT Sloan CIO Symposium’s Innovation Showcase have launched partner programs or are in the process of doing so.

While software-defined data centers are not yet available, there is considerable buzz building up about the possibility of virtualizing an ever-larger part of the data center as such technologies, including server and storage virtualization, software-defined networking and storage, and VDI and hyper-converged infrastructures, continue to come to market.

The 12th Annual MIT Sloan CIO Symposium today announced the ten finalists for its 2015 Innovation Showcase. The selected companies have developed cutting edge solutions that provide both strong value and innovation to digital enterprises now and in the future.

Premise: Rolling your own private cloud using OpenStack has been a high risk strategy for the vast majority of enterprises. The first five years of OpenStack’s life, the first epoch, was characterised by over-marketing and under-execution, founders going out of business (Nebula Inc), diversifying away (Rackspace), losing talent (PistonCloud’s CTO moving to Pivotal) or being acquired by the five tech titans (HP, Cisco, EMC, IBM, RedHat).

Last week, we took a closer look at the business and management considerations involved in building a private cloud. This week, we examine five private cloud vendors and what they have to offer in terms of management and administration, compatibility with your existing infrastructure investments, complexity in deployment and maintenance, and security.

The tenth release of OpenStack, “Juno,” last October, added a batch of new enterprise features aimed at boosting stability and performance and extending the reach of the open source tool to telecommunications and service provider datacenters.

This week the OpenStack Podcast’s guest rockstar was Sirish Raghuram. He’s the co-founder and CEO of Platform9 (www.platform9.com), and he’s also a former long-term VMware employee.

I have to be honest, Platform9 caught me by surprise at VFD4 with what seemed to be their answer for an AWS like offering.

For many data centers the most appealing part of the public cloud is the automated provisioning. Users or application owners simply define the type and amount of compute and storage they need and the public cloud automatically provisions the exact resources. Platform9 promises to deliver a public-cloud type of provisioning onto in-house infrastructure for authorized users, while satisfying IT/Ops policies.